Ligures

The Ligures or Ligurians (Latin: Ligures, singular Ligus or Ligur; Ancient Greek: Λίγυες, romanized: Lígues) were an ancient people of the north-western Mediterranean, centred on north-western Italy and extending along the neighbouring coast of south-eastern Gaul. Their name was among the oldest mentioned by ancient writers, being attested from the archaic Greek geographers down to the Roman conquest. In a narrow sense, the name belonged to a population of north-western Italy, where a distinctive material culture is recognisable from the Bronze Age. The chief markers of Ligurian identity here were an indigenous cremation rite and distinctively non-Celtic onomastics. Another ancient tradition, going back to the 6th century BC, applied the name Ligyes to a much broader and largely unknown area inhabited by 'barbarians' in the far west. The earliest Greek geographers placed them at the edge of the known world, in a semi-mythical setting similar to that of the Ethiopians and Scythians. Such descriptions covered a shifting, ill-defined area and their ethnic value is much debated by modern scholars, since several of the peoples they reckoned Ligurian, especially in southern Gaul, bore unmistakably Celtic names. The ancient Ligures are usually held to descend from the Bronze Age population of north-western Italy, though a self-aware people organised on a tribal basis probably took shape only in the Iron Age, under Etruscan and Greek stimulus. From the 7th century BC, contact with the Etruscans and Greeks, focused on the trading post (emporium) of Genoa, drew them into Mediterranean trade and offered some Ligures an outlet in mercenary service. The Ligurian economy was a poor one, resting on herding, subsistence agriculture and the exploitation of woodland, and they resorted to raiding and piracy at times when economic conditions worsened. Their language is known only at second hand, almost entirely from names. Although modern...